Helena Rubinstein used guile, brilliant branding, and more than a few falsehoods to lift cosmetics from an accessory for prostitutes to a desired luxury item. Geoffrey Jones reveals her history.
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The food industry is under intense study at Harvard Business School. This story sampler looks at issues including restaurant marketing, chefs as CEOs, and the business of food science.
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Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma was a classic text on how companies fail. In a new book, Competing Against Luck, Christensen tackles the opposite challenge: how companies succeed. First lesson, discover what job consumers are hiring your product to do.
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Harvard Business School’s Organizational Lab helps businesses solve operational problems by changing the way their company is organized. Ethan Bernstein and Clayton Christensen explain how academics and business leaders can work together to create a better org chart.
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When is a job promotion a bad thing? Does networking leave an oily substance on your clothing? From our archives we look at career change in the twenty-first century, where researchers are offering fresh insights into our dynamic workplaces.

Scholarly economic theory applies to more than just business. The same causal mechanisms that drive big corporations to success can be just as effective in driving our personal lives, says Professor Clayton M. Christensen.
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How do you create a company that unleashes and capitalizes on innovation? HBS faculty experts in culture, customers, creativity, marketing, and the DNA of innovators offer up ideas. From HBS Alumni Bulletin.
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World-renowned innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen explores the personal benefits of business research in the forthcoming book How Will You Measure Your Life? Coauthored with James Allworth and Karen Dillon, the book explains how well-tested academic theories can help us find meaning and happiness not just at work, but in life.
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In The Innovative University, authors Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities. Key concepts include: A disruptive innovation brings to market a product or service that isn't as good as the best traditional offerings, but is less expensive and easier to use. Online learning is a disruptive technology that is making colleges and universities reconsider their higher education models.
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In The Innovator's DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gergersen, and Clayton M. Christensen build on the idea of disruptive innovation to outline the five discovery skills that distinguish the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world from the run-of-the-mill corporate managers.
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About 95 percent of new products fail. The problem often is that their creators are using an ineffective market segmentation mechanism, according to HBS professor Clayton Christensen. It's time for companies to look at products the way customers do: as a way to get a job done.
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In The Innovator's Prescription, professor Clayton Christensen and his coauthors target disruptive innovations that will make health care both more affordable and more effective in the future. Q&A with Christensen. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin. Key concepts include: Today's doctors are rewarded for the number and cost of the services they provide rather than by the value of those services in helping patients. We need a system of new value networks in health care that disrupt old business models.
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Simple solutions to complex problems lead to breakthroughs in industries from retailing to personal computers to printing. So let's try health care, too. According to HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen and coauthors of The Innovator's Prescription, such disruption to an industry might look like a threat, but it "always proves to be an extraordinary growth opportunity." Book excerpt. Key concepts include: Most disruptions have three enablers: a simplifying technology, a business model innovation, and a disruptive value network. Business model innovations are almost always forged by new entrants to an industry. Disruption of an industry rarely happens piecemeal. It is more common that entirely new value networks arise, displacing the old. Always, the technological enablers of disruption are successfully deployed against an industry's simplest problems first. Health care is no different.
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HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, joins colleagues Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson to advocate for ways in which ideas around innovation can spur much-needed improvements in public education. A Q&A with the authors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Key concepts include: As an industry, education has certain elements that have made the market difficult to penetrate and lasting reform hard to come by. As a general rule, the most promising areas for innovation are pockets or areas that appear unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents and where there are people who would like to do something but cannot access the available offering. To improve education as an industry, businesspeople might consider investing in technological platforms that will allow for robust educational user networks to emerge.
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How do business academics know they are categorizing or measuring the best things to help us understand interesting phenomena? Scholars waste a lot of time and energy disparaging and defending various research methods. Yet the stakes are high for business academics to create theory that is intellectually rigorous, practically useful, and able to stand the tests of time. The authors describe a three-stage process for building theory; discuss the role of anomalies for building better theory; and suggest how scholars can refine research questions, carry out projects, and design student coursework. Key concepts include: A common language about the research process will help management scholars build more effectively on each other's work. If management researchers follow a robust, reliable process, even the most "average" among them can produce and publish research that is of high value to academics and practitioners. The dichotomy that many people see between teaching and research need not create conflict.
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Marketers should think less about market segments and more about the jobs customers want to do. A Harvard Business Review excerpt by HBS professor Clayton M. Christensen, Intuit’s Scott Cook, and Advertising Research Foundation’s Taddy Hall.
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You have three potential innovations, but resources to develop just one. Here are diagnostics to help you make the best decision. From Strategy & Innovation newsletter.
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"Right stuff" managers may be entirely wrong to lead a new-growth business. An excerpt from The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Raynor.
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